The Spire

by Richard North Patterson

“I’m not sure yet. It seems like I’ve got two choices: teaching or a curatorship—the collection side of the museum world.”

  “Not running an art gallery?”

  “God, no,” Taylor answered with a laugh. “My senior year at Williams, they took us around to visit people who owned galleries. I met a bunch of glamorous women wearing expensive jewelry and Hermès scarves, more absorbed in bling than scholarship. It was like visiting a club where I could never belong.” Her tone became self-mocking. “I’m way too serious a person, Mark. I need to work for a museum with a sense of adventure, or teach in a good school in a good city with smart students and colleagues, where I can further refine my extraordinary gifts. With all respect to your new position, I’d go mad in Wayne, Ohio.”

  “So what constitutes a good city?”

  “New York, definitely. There’s more there there—art, music, theater, varied ethnic influences, and every species of humanity you can think of. Assuming I can afford it.”

  “What about Boston?”

  “It’s not a terrible city,” Taylor allowed. A mischievous smile played on her lips. “On the downside, it’s painfully provincial—too many overeducated people with too little to do, except obsessing over the Red Sox and worshipping their ancestors. Plus it’s jam-packed with racists, too muggy in the summer, and five degrees too cold in January.”

  Though intended to tease him, Darrow realized, the description had a certain jaundiced accuracy. “Picky,” he said.

  “Oh, I’d look at Boston, if the job were right. There are some very good schools there. And if the Museum of Fine Arts ever got serious about contemporary works . . .” She stopped, laughing at herself. “As if it’s my choice. Right now, the only job I have is helping you attack this aesthetic nightmare. Care to look at what I’ve brought?”

  “Sure.” Darrow hesitated, then asked, “Are you hungry? I used to know a place that delivers Chinese food.”

  “In Wayne?” Her voice softened. “I’ll stop being a critic, Mark. I’m always up for experiments.”

  LEAFING THROUGH THE pages, they nibbled passable chow mein and snow peas and started a new bottle of sauvignon blanc. To Mark’s relief, he liked much of what Taylor had selected as examples of what he might look for: a chromagraphic print by Andreas Gursky of a bank tower at night; an installation by James Turrell, a field of colored light so cleverly designed that its elements looked like phantom shapes; a piece composed of Ektacolor prints by Richard Prince, four beautiful but strikingly different women, their heads tilted in the same direction to appraise some unseen object; a gelatin-silver print by James Casebere; and, though perhaps too challenging to live with, eight black-and-white photographs by the German Anselm Kiefer, together forming a stark portrait of stone and gnarled trees disturbingly evocative of Nazi art. Taken together, Taylor’s compilation bespoke a keen eye, considerable aesthetic judgment, and, flattering to Darrow, a great deal of time and thought. Finishing, he imagined himself embarking on a new project with a curiosity and enthusiasm he had not felt since Lee’s death.

  “Can you leave this here?” he asked. “I’d like to look it over some more.”

  “Of course. That’s why I put it together.”

  Darrow closed the book. “Thank you, Taylor—really. It’s enjoyable to think about redesigning a space again.”

  Taylor sipped her wine. “What was your town house in Boston like?”

  “As light as we could make it, and filled with modern art.” He touched the notebook. “Though not this modern. Among other things, we had a Vasarely, an Agam, and a Dalí print. But our criteria was less the artist than how we felt about the piece.”

  “Did you have an art consultant?”

  “No. Lee and I made it our project. Fortunately, we had similar tastes—bright colors, bold images, abstract forms. No paintings of horses, hunting parties, dilapidated barns, or pastoral New England. Half the fun was looking at a space and imagining the right piece for it; the other half was finding it. By the end, every object in the house came with its own story.”

  The smile Taylor gave him seemed reflective, even wistful. “Is that why you didn’t bring anything with you? Even photographs?”

  “I left in a hurry. I figured there would be time to settle in later.” He took another sip of wine, then decided to give Taylor a deeper version of the truth. “To a degree I didn’t fully appreciate, at least until now, the town house became the museum of our marriage. But I couldn’t seem to change anything, because I couldn’t ask Lee about it.” He gazed into his wine glass, speaking quietly. “Even her closet stayed the same. Shortly after the first anniversary of her death, I made myself give her clothes to charity. It felt weird, like I was losing another piece of her. I remember staring at the empty closet and not knowing what to do.”

  Pausing, Darrow felt the ache of memory. Softly, Taylor said, “I’m sorry.”

  “For asking? Don’t be. I never say these things, and maybe I should. Perhaps it would help to talk about her to another human being.”

  He felt Taylor watching his face. “I remember her, actually.”

  Darrow looked up at her. “How?”

  “Since college, I’ve been an election junkie. Lee was on MSNBC a lot—I remember thinking how smart she was, with a wicked, almost subversive sense of humor. Not to mention that she was really pretty. Anyone would have been drawn to her.”

  “Oh, they were. The night we met—at a cocktail party, of all things—I had loads of competition.”

  Taylor smiled at this. “But you won out, of course.”

  “I had certain natural advantages. Lee and I were both self-invented: kids from small towns whose parents never got past high school, and whose families were utterly dysfunctional.” Darrow poured more wine. “Lee was from Virginia, the smartest kid around. Her dad sold insurance; her mother kept the books; Lee worked in the office after school. When she left for the University of Virginia, she never looked back. Ever.”

  “And you were like that, too.”

  “Uh-huh, especially after what happened at Caldwell. Both of us hell-bent on the future. We never took success for granted, because we’d never had a lot. That made us different from almost everyone around us—on an almost instinctive level, we got each other.” Darrow looked down again. “For Lee, her career was more than an identity. It was the thing that kept her from being like her alcoholic father or, worse, a mother so scarred and narrow that what she felt for Lee was jealousy.”

  Taylor considered that. “She hardly looked like a woman in danger of regressing.”

  “No way. Still, on one level I could understand her—as I said, I still have the superstitious sense that I’ll become who I was before Lionel changed everything. But Lee had a depth of fear beyond anything she could express, or I could fathom. The idea of becoming her mother tied her in a psychic knot.” Almost against his will, Darrow felt himself edging closer to the source of his unspoken pain. “The decision to become pregnant was extremely hard for Lee. But she knew how much I wanted to give a child the love and security I’d never had.” His voice softened. “Up to the day she died, I worried that she’d just given in. But I never asked. I was too afraid of the answer, and what it might cause her to do.”

  All at once, Darrow knew that finishing the story would be too hard. He felt Taylor appraising him and then, without words, deciding not to press him. “Lately,” she said, “I’ve thought about having kids. In a wholly abstract sort of way.”

  Relieved, Darrow turned to her. “What did you conclude?”

  “That I want them. It came to me when I realized that the guy I was involved with imagined being the only child of our marriage. I’d like to be a mother, as good as I believe my mother was. But for the right reasons.”

  “Which are?”

  In Taylor’s silence, Darrow watched her framing the answer with care. “For me, parenting can’t be a means of making up to myself for what I missed, using my child as a surrogate. There’s too much narcissism in th
e way some people parent, and I don’t want to become an obsessive mother. Moms or dads like that too often warp their children, or force them to fill parental needs in some fairly unhealthy ways.” After taking a sip of wine, she finished quietly: “The gap between the myth of what family should be and the sad reality of what it often is can be pretty hard on everyone.”

  Perhaps Taylor was talking about her own family, or the better family she hoped to have. But, however tactfully, she had also held Darrow’s own image of fatherhood to the light. He felt torn between the desire to say something and uncertainty about what he wished to say. Then Taylor checked her watch. “I forgot this was a school night, Mark. It’s getting late for both of us.”

  Darrow felt a stab of disappointment. Awkwardly, he said, “I hope we’re not finished.”

  She gave him a swift, sidelong glance. “With your surroundings? We’ve barely started.”

  Darrow walked her to the door. “This weekend,” he ventured, “why don’t we do something?”

  Taylor looked amused. “Something? Whatever it is, I’m willing to discuss it.”

  Later, falling into bed, Darrow felt restless. Then he remembered finding the package Rusty Clark’s assistant had left on his doorstep, a partial transcript of Steve Tillman’s trial. Turning on the light, he began reading.

  11

  T

  HE NEXT MORNING, DARROW MET WITH THE PUBLIC relations expert hired to deal with the embezzlement. It was brief and efficient: all statements by the school would come from Darrow himself, whose focus on imposing strict accounting controls seemed to placate restive alumni. But the next meeting, with Provost Farr and faculty department heads, was longer.

  It was the last such gathering before the faculty went off for their various summer studies, trips abroad, or retreats to produce works of scholarship. As a group, Darrow had discovered, the heads represented the usual mix of personalities—wry, enthusiastic, detached, rancorous, intemperate, and ingratiating. Though most accepted his proposal to restrict faculty-student dating, their other complaints were many. Some lobbied to improve the lives of students; others, to assert the primacy of their departments in the battle over Caldwell’s slim resources. There was not enough money to satisfy them all—or any of them. Instead Darrow solicited a written summary of their departments’ needs and ambitions, promising that, in due course, he would consider these in framing an endowment plan—which, however, must also finance his aim to recruit disadvantaged students. They departed in various states of hope and discontent. It was, Farr told him afterward, the best Darrow could hope for.

  His workday ended with a conference call from Joe Betts and Greg Fox, scheduled at Joe’s urgent request. With evident satisfaction, Fox reported the discovery of a second account in the name of Caldwell College, opened at the local branch of the First Columbus Bank, for which the signature card bore Clark Durbin’s name. “What’s different here,” Fox explained, “is that the money didn’t leave for Switzerland—it came back.”

  “How much?” Darrow asked.

  “Fifty thousand dollars, transferred three months ago.”

  “This clinches it,” Joe Betts’s voice broke in. “Durbin laundered the money through Switzerland and sent it back to himself in Wayne.”

  “It seems circular to me,” Darrow said. “Why would Durbin do that?”

  “Concealment,” Joe answered promptly. “He was trying to make it harder to trace the flow of cash. This is the last piece of evidence we need to prosecute.”

  Darrow scribbled two words on his notepad: “Why Columbus?” Then he asked, “What do you think, Greg?”

  “I’m with Joe,” Fox answered crisply. “Durbin outsmarted himself. Most embezzlers do.”

  “True enough,” Darrow answered. “I’ll let Mike Riley know about this. He’ll be in touch with you soon.”

  “Your guy?” Joe’s voice rose slightly. “Do we really need him after this? Seems like a waste of time and money.”

  “Time, maybe. Not money. I’ll pay him myself.”

  After a moment’s silence, Fox allowed a note of strained patience to seep into his voice. “I’ll be waiting for his call.”

  Hanging up, Darrow scribbled, “Missing: $850,000.” Then he left a voice message with Mike Riley in Boston, and hurried out the door.

  IT WAS A soft summer evening, lightly humid, and the rolling landscape outside Wayne evoked a slice of Darrow’s teenage years: aimless drives with friends, radio blaring, cold six-packs of beer hidden in the trunk while they searched for a place to drink it. But the once-verdant farmland was now dotted with pseudobaronial homes, their acreage demarked by rustic fences—the retreats of Columbus-based businessmen like Joe Betts, designed to suggest the horse country of Kentucky. Only Carly Simmons’s place had been there twenty years ago: a rambling white nineteenth-century farmhouse, with a barn that still displayed a worn advertisement for Red Man chewing tobacco, its yellow letters peeling, its fierce-looking Indian head fading into commercial history. The sight made Darrow smile.

  Simmons waited in a fenced-off area in front of the barn, throwing a wooden stick to a black terrier who returned it eagerly and repeatedly. As the wheels of Darrow’s Porsche crunched the gravel driveway, Simmons turned and waved by way of greeting. Even after sixteen years she looked familiar, though the blond woman who’d once knelt by Angela’s body was stockier now, her curls tipped with gray. Her ruddy face flushed from exercise, she gave him a firm handshake.

  “So you’re president of Caldwell,” she said without preface.

  “Yup.”

  “A lot to do, I imagine.” Her tone flattened out. “You also found her body, I remember.”

  Darrow nodded. “It’s something you don’t forget. Now that I’m back, I’ve started thinking about all the things I still don’t know.”

  “Don’t blame you,” Simmons said matter-of-factly. “It was one of my first cases, and it sticks in the mind. Partly because of the victim, partly because I pretzeled myself to get things right.”

  The statement was factual, and undefensive. But her large brown eyes seemed to examine him closely. “So,” she finished, “you’re back, and now you’re nagged by unanswered questions. What do you want to know?”

  “Several things,” Darrow said, “in no particular order. For example, how drunk was Angela before she died?”

  The terrier nudged Simmons’s leg, stick between its teeth. Reaching down, Simmons retrieved the piece of wood and threw it toward the fence. “Drunk enough,” she answered. “It’s hard to be precise. But tests on the two glasses we found in Steve’s room showed they’d both kept on drinking. Though from the toxicology report, Angela had begun to metabolize the alcohol before she died.”

  Darrow watched the dog scamper for the stick, tail bobbing. “What does that tell you?”

  The lines at the corners of Simmons’s eyes deepened slightly. “That she’d stopped consuming alcohol. Also, possibly, that she’d had some form of physical activity.”

  “Like walking?”

  “Maybe. Or sex.”

  “How drunk was Steve?”

  Simmons smiled faintly. “That was kind of critical, given his story. You don’t black out on a couple of Miller Lites. Let alone suffer gaps in memory.” She paused, ordering her thoughts. “By his own account, Tillman was a seasoned drinker, much more so than she was. That means he metabolized alcohol more quickly.

  “By the time we took his blood sample, maybe nine hours later, he was a hair below the legal limit of .08 blood alcohol concentration. Once you stop drinking, you drop about .0125 every hour. So put Tillman up around 2.0 at the height of his intoxication.”

  “That’s pretty drunk.”

  Simmons nodded. “I can’t tell you at what point the kid’s lights would start going out. But yeah, that’s pretty drunk. Not to mention he’d done some coke.”

  “So we’ve got a drunk with a bum knee lugging a dead body around campus.”

  Simmons threw the stick again. �
�So they say. Maybe the coke jacked him up. I don’t try the cases; I just do the corpses.”

  “Any chance she was strangled near the Spire?”

  The question made her turn, eyes focused on the question. “Are you familiar with the concept of lividity?”

  “Uh-huh. Once the heart stops pumping, gravity governs the flow of blood. Depending on the position of the body, blood flows to its lowest point.” Darrow shoved his hands into his pockets. “I found Angela lying face-up. So the blood should have gravitated to her back.”

  “Which it did.”

  “Nowhere else?”

  Simmons slowly shook her head. “I checked her fingers and toes. No lividity.”

  “What did that suggest?”

  Crossing her arms, Simmons ignored the dog at her feet. “There are two possibilities. The first is that the killer carried Angela to where you found her quickly enough that the blood didn’t flow to her extremities. The second is that she was strangled much closer to the Spire.”

  Darrow felt his instincts quicken. “So there’s no medical evidence affirmatively suggesting that she was carried there?”

  Simmons shook her head again. “I can’t rule that out. Nor can I rule it in.”

  Watching the terrier paw Simmons’s pant leg for attention, Darrow tried to organize his thoughts. “What about time of death?” he asked.

  Simmons threw the stick again. “That’s more art than science. We go on body temperature. But there’s all sorts of variables: ambient air temperature, moving air currents, type of clothing, how long the body had been outside. Angela was slender, causing her body to cool more quickly. But she was wearing a heavy coat. So it was hard to be exact.”

  Listening to the vicissitudes of science, Darrow remembered Angela herself—her face at the party so human and vulnerable, in death a mask of agony.

  “The range we settled on,” Simmons continued, “was that she’d been dead from six to twelve hours. But my best estimate was she’d died between two and three A.M. Which, as it turned out, was more or less consistent with the trial testimony.”